The Long Haul
The recent standoff between the United States and China over the fate of a downed reconnaissance plane is the first international relations crisis of the new millennium. The biggest lesson learned was that China is the next best thing to having a strategic rival. Forget rogue nations like Iraq and North Korea; China is the perfect foil for US policy makers.
China is a nation getting up from a 400-year sleep that saw its status as world power eroded relative to the rest of the world. The United States wasn’t even a nation when China was last dominant. Its leaders have spent the last 50 years experimenting with communism but have opted to let capitalism take over while maintaining the authoritarian apparatus of Mao.
In this case the short-term tension between China and the United States is over. In the long term there are many issues yet to be resolved-the selling of weapons to Taiwan, the 2008 Olympic games, trade relations and most importantly which nation will be the dominant power in Asia.
The interesting thing about International Relations is that it is difficult (near impossible) to know the long-term outcomes of the events in the past few weeks. Former US ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke (as recounted in Michael Ignatieff’s book Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond), “rejects the Kissingerian idea of diplomacy as chess. It’s more like jazz, he says, improvisation on a theme.”
In hindsight every foreign policy decision seems like the product of cold calculated chess strategy. In the case of China and America the diplomacy must be jazz and improvisation-at the very least ad-hoc in nature. This situation will likely be a blip on the radar of history as trade with China has made any sort of real direct competition with them unlikely.
The past three US administrations have tried to deal with two competing ways to deal with China. The Administration of Bush’s father argued for a relationship of ‘strategic partner’. It was difficult for Bush to overlook the problems of China-considering the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident.
When President Clinton was running for president in 1992 he argued that the US should take a harder line with them and hold them accountable for the human rights problems. He quickly changed his tune and under his watch the relationship between the two nations became very close.
In the 2000 election Candidate Bush argued to change the relationship to one where China was viewed as a ‘strategic competitor’. But it is now clear that it is not possible to let your businesses trade with them and be in an aggressive competitive relationship at the same time.
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